Saturday, November 7, 2015

Honky (San Diego Repertory Theatre/PBS “OnStage in America," 2014)

I turned the TV back on and watched one of the most
fascinating plays I’ve seen in quite some time: Honky, written by Greg Kalleres and premiered at the Urban
Stages Theatre in New York in 2013, though the production being shown on KPBS
was taped last year at the San Diego Repertory Theatre (which means I could
conceivably have seen this production “live,” and I’m kicking myself for having
missed it!). The ads for the show touted it as a stereotype-breaking and
totally irreverent, potentially offensive, satire on how race is treated in
America today and specifically how we’ve managed to make that “national
dialogue on race” everyone calls for whenever there’s a big race riot or a
racially motivated mass shooting almost impossible by declaring so much of the language
“offensive” and therefore off limits. Kalleres doesn’t use the term
“microaggression,” probably because he started writing his play before that one
was coined, but he has constructed a surprisingly coherent story (I had
half-expected and half-feared it would be a loosely connected string of
vignettes, but though it has some rapid cinema-style cutbacks between
characters it has five clearly defined principal roles and a coherent, well
constructed and reasonably credibly resolved plot line) within which to make
his points not only about the persistence of American racism and American racial guilt, but the fundamentally
exploitative nature of American capitalism in general and mass marketing in
particular.

The story opens in the office of Davis (James Newcomb), the CEO of
Skymax Shoes, which for years has been making elaborately colored athletic
shoes tailored to what Davis euphemistically calls the “urban” — i.e., Black —
community. (I couldn’t help but be reminded of Art Hoppe’s 1970’s column about a
Black man saying that the term “Black” was out-of-date and “now they call me a
City … you hear politicians saying we have to do something about the problems
of our Cities? That’s us they’re
talking about!” Later Hoppe had that speaker quote a Right-winger as saying
that the programs to help Cities had become part of a Power-Mad Federal
Bureaucracy, and comment, “What a country! A poor little Black kid like me can
grow up to be the entire federal government!”) The company is reeling from the
bad press that resulted when a 14-year-old Black kid was killed by another
Black kid in a fight over his Sky 16 sneakers. This is happening just when the
company is about to introduce the Sky 17, and to do damage control the CEO has
called in Thomas Hodge (Gerard Joseph), the designer of the Sky 16 and 17
shoes. Thomas is visibly Black but, like President Obama (and I suspect the
parallel was intended both by Kalleres and San Diego Rep artistic director Sam
Woodhouse, who directed the production), is light-skinned, well spoken and
clearly not from a ghetto
background — which leads him to doubt his own racial “authenticity.” The
conversation between Thomas and Davis clearly spirals out of control as Davis
keeps stumbling into words and phrases that connote his own unconscious racism
even while consciously trying not
to offend — in fact, that’s about how all interactions between white and Black characters go in this play — and
Davis gives Thomas the message that the company’s board has decided that
instead of marketing strictly to Black people, they want to market to whites,
but their products first have to be adopted by Blacks so suburban whites will
think they’re “authentic” parts of the Black gangbanger style they’re trying to
emulate. (What he doesn’t tell
Thomas, and which we learn only later, is the board is making this change to
make the company a more tempting acquisition target for Nike, which is in
negotiations to buy them out.) Thomas also tries to get a guilt charge out of
Davis by saying the murdered boy was his cousin — which he wasn’t.

The scene
then cuts (the movie term is a pretty good indication of how quickly the scenes
change, courtesy of a well-oiled machine that supplies appropriate “ghetto”
music as the sets revolve to move us from one space to another) to the office
of a therapist, Ella Hodge, whom we later find out is Thomas’s sister. She’s
seeing a new patient, Peter (Francis Gercke), an advertising copywriter who
wrote the commercial that made the Sky 16 shoe such a big hit and therefore
feels responsible for the shooting of that 14-year-old kid. Unwilling to tell a
therapist — and a Black therapist, at that — what’s really bothering him, Peter
tells her about his fiancée, whom he’s having doubts about because “she’s so white.” In the next scene we see Peter at home with his
fiancée, Andie (Jacque Wilke), whom we first meet doing aerobics, and she is
indeed as “white,” culturally as well as racially, as Peter said she was.
Eventually Andie and Thomas (as in “Uncle”? That seems to have been the one
question that occurred to me that playwright Kalleres didn’t get asked in the quite compelling 15-minute
on-screen interview he gave after the show) meet at a party being thrown by
Skymax and hook up, and we get a couple of hot sex scenes between them in which
the sight of Gerard Joseph wearing nothing but very clingy and revealing underpants would have given me
an aesthetic charge even if it hadn’t been in the context of such a great play.
Andie admits that at first she was drawn to Gerard because of the whole racist
mythology about Black men being so well hung and so great in bed, but as the
play (and their relationship) progresses it’s clear she’s staying with him
because he’s genuinely more interesting and better for her than the moderately
attractive but terminally wimpy Peter. Meanwhile, Davis’s “insensitive”
language towards Thomas gets reported to the Skymax board, and an investigator
shows up to interview him, carrying a portable tape recorder on which he wants
to record Davis apologizing for his insensitivity so they can have that on
record and keep him on as CEO — only the situation snowballs and he ends up
getting fired. Peter, meanwhile, finds himself sexually attracted to his
therapist and asks her out to dinner, and though she turns him down (oddly she does
not say it would be inappropriate
for him to date her because she’s his therapist; instead she tries to beg off
and say she’s simply not interested), later on he crashes her apartment (it’s
the same set as her office; obviously we’re supposed to read it as a live-work
space) in the middle of the night, drunk, and this time she comes on to him and freaks him out.

Honky — a title chosen by Kalleres because it was the
closest he could find to a term for white people similarly insulting to the
“N-word” for Blacks (and the phrase “the ‘N-word’” is itself an example of the
idiocy surrounding America’s racial discourse Kalleres wrote his play to
ridicule!) — is an excellent drama, perched uncertainly on the boundary between
serious and comic. Indeed, after one early performance Kalleres thought he had
failed as a writer because no one had laughed; later he heard from audience
members that they had found the
play funny but were deliberately holding back their laughter because they
weren’t sure they were “supposed” to find it funny. He also said that a
talented Black actress he really wanted in the first production wasn’t sure she
should audition for it because she was uncertain as to whether it was
“appropriate” for her to play the part. The ultimate knife-twist in Kalleres’
satire is a drug invented by Dr. Driscoll (Jacob Bruce), who got the idea from
a Ku Klux Klansman who took a fall off a roof and underwent chemical changes in
his brain; he recovered physically but the altered brain chemistry eliminated
all his racist beliefs. Driscoll studied this man and eventually synthesized
the chemical into a drug which at different times is either taken or offered to
most of the principals. It has a quirky side effect in that it causes its users
to hallucinate that they’re being visited by real-life figures in America’s
racial history; Davis (as in Jefferson? Again, one wonders whether Kalleres was
going for a specific parallel in how he named his characters) is forced to take
it by his company’s board as a condition for keeping his job, and he gets
visited by Frederick Douglass (DeLeon Dallas, who also doubles as one of two
street thugs who hang out on the New York subway and interact with the main
character), whom he makes talk like a modern-day gangsta rapper. Emilia, after
a shock scene in which we see her popping the anti-racism pills, gets a visit
from Abraham Lincoln (also Jacob Bruce, though the doubling is poor because
he’s too short and heavy-set to be credible — unlike DeLeon Dallas, whose stage
makeup as Douglass is remarkably close to the photos of the real one), who
boasts that he freed her people and makes a pass at her.

After the plot is
resolved the actors return for a spot commercial for the drug — obviously
written by Kalleres with reference to his own days as an advertising
copywriter. Indeed, one fascinating thing about Honky is how the character closest to the playwright’s own
background, Peter, is the least sympathetic and most annoying of the five
principals! Along with the satire of race relations, Honky is almost inevitably a satire of capitalism itself,
particularly the way modern marketing campaigns salami-slice the American
population into “niches” and how they exploit racial, gender and other
stereotypes to move the merchandise. Characters, both white and Black (other
racial groups get mentioned in the dialogue but aren’t shown on stage),
concerned about their own “authenticity” are enmeshed in an economic system in
which the very idea of “authenticity” has become another marketing gimmick, and
the most successful products are the ones whose manufacturers and advertising
directors are best able to build a fake sense of “authenticity” around them. The great irony is that “fake
authenticity” is not only not an
oxymoron, it’s the only way companies like Skymax can market and make money
from overpriced and frankly hideous shoes, and the characters are all too aware
that the fact that someone would literally kill another person for their product indicates that they’ve reached
the acme and created the ultimate in phony “authenticity.” Honky is a rich and fascinating work of art — one that
avoids the preachiness of plays and films that attempt to deal with America’s
racial riddles — though it’s also a piece that suffers more than most from the
infuriating Puritanism imposed on American broadcasting by the Federal
Communications Commission and its rules about “obscenity” and “indecency” on
the air. So many swear words get bleeped that at times there are more bleeps
than actual dialogue!